Crusader

by Max Brand

  “Yes.”

  “It makes me shiver just to think of them . . . but I hope he wins.”

  “Why?”

  “Ned has followed a hunch. He’s bet every cent he can put his hands on that Crusader will win. I don’t know what we’ll do if he fails.”

  In the darkness among the trees, as he passed on, the big man formed two solemn resolutions. The first was that Crusader should not lose if he ran the race; the second was that nothing under heaven should tempt him to any act of violence that would keep him from riding.

  MERVIN DECIDES AGAINST CAMDEN

  He waited to hear and see no more. He reined Crusader back into the night and fled softly back toward the mountains.

  Having strolled to the rim of the hollow, the girl and Mervin came back again. They no longer talked of the race. It was quite another subject, quite another tone. Mervin was telling her plainly and forcefully that he was breaking his heart on her account, and that he would die without her. At this, the heartless girl laughed. Oh, that Camden could have been near to hear that laughter, for it would have taken a great burden from his mind.

  That same mirth made Mervin stand very straight and stiff, and grow extremely red.

  She explained at once, and without embarrassment. “I’m mighty flattered by all that you’ve been saying,” she told him. “But, of course, I don’t believe a word of it. You like me because I’m different. Not because you have to have me. I’m not the kind of girl that you’re used to in the East. But suppose we were married. Do you think it would turn out well? Could you get along in country like this? Or could I get along in the city?”

  “If you let me take the chance. . . .”

  “That would be a wild gamble,” Ruth Manners stated.

  At this, he looked at her sharply, through the dark. In fact, he was immensely pleased by this mental acuteness. He was not one of those who care for a clinging vine as a wife. He liked cleverness, and she was very clever. She saw through him just far enough to make him nervous, although he still felt that the secrets of his nature were securely kept from her.

  “If you really cared for a man,” he said, “would you ask all of these questions, and have all of these doubts about East and West and city and country?”

  “I guess not,” Ruth answered with stunning frankness. “That’s partly why I know that I don’t care for you enough to marry you safely, Charles. My idea of love is a thing that will carry me off on wings. I won’t be able to help myself.”

  “You’ll never find a man in the world,” Charles Mervin said with infinite conviction, “who’ll be able to take you so far off your feet as that.”

  Her answer took his breath. “I’ve already met one who did . . . almost.”

  “What?” cried Mervin.

  “I have only talked with him once, and that was the strangest talk any woman ever had with any man. He’s the only man I was ever afraid of. If he wanted my love, I think he could take it, whether I wanted him or not.”

  Mervin could not believe his ears. “What man is that?” he asked finally.

  “I couldn’t tell you his name.”

  “Why not? If I know what you really like, perhaps I could make myself more after that pattern.”

  At this she laughed again, but with such an open frankness that he could not read malice into the sound.

  “I laugh,” she said, “because, if you knew his name, you’d be horrified. There’s nobody in the world like him, Charles.”

  “By Jove,” cried Mervin, “I think you’re more than half in love with this man already, without knowing it!”

  She was silent for a moment. He feared that he had offended her, until she spoke again, thoughtfully. “Perhaps I am,” she said.“I don’t know, really. Perhaps I am.”

  “I mean,” he said, “that you may be caught by some foolish illusion. . . .” He corrected himself with haste. “I don’t intend that as it sounds. But you see, sometimes even the strongest-minded people are taken off their balance by strange things. . . .”

  “And what could be stranger than a wild man?” asked the girl, nodding in the night.

  “A wild man?”

  “Just that.”

  A chill of conviction darted through him. “Ruth,” he cried, “you’re talking about that inhuman devil . . . big Harry Camden!”

  The words came out before he knew it—before he was prepared for them. He would have given a great deal to recall them after it was too late—after he realized the absurdity of what he had said. But the greatest shock of all was her answer.

  “How did you guess that, Charles?”

  “I’m right, then?” breathed Mervin. “It’s Camden whom you prefer to me . . . I mean. . . .”

  “Don’t ask me,” the girl advised. “I don’t know. I can’t think. My mind’s all whirling. Charles, I’m going in.”

  He did not attempt to restrain her, but he watched the door open, saw her stand for an instant against the rectangle of yellow lamplight, then saw her disappear beyond the black wall of the house.

  So Mervin went slowly to his horse, and mounted it, and began to ride hard through the night. He had made up his mind not ten seconds after the girl had spoken. What he decided was, first of all, that she was far more deeply attracted by Camden than she herself realized. In the second place, the form of Harry Camden loomed upon his eye again. He had always thought of him as a mere abysmal brute. He looked back into the picture of the man now and felt that he saw in it something that might prove attractive even to a woman—especially to a vigorous-minded girl like Ruth Manners. She had touched the huge fellow with the wand of romance and converted him, in a trice, into a hero. All that was strange about him helped the illusion. Charles Mervin, shuddering, nodded with a deeper conviction. If he desired her in the first place as his own wife, he desired her in the second place to save her from the terrible fate of becoming the bride of such a creature as Camden, that mighty-handed wild brute who happened to wear the form of a man.

  Consequently, before the door had closed upon her, he had decided that the next step in his courtship of the lady should preferably be the removal of Camden from his path as a rival. He was a brisk young man, this Charles Mervin. Now that he had made up his mind, he saw that two things could be accomplished in one mission.

  He covered five miles of country until he came to the house that he had in mind. It was the remnant of what had once been a great ranch. The house itself had been a huge three-story affair, with four wooden turrets, each with a single hexagonal room in it, set off with six shuttered windows. The main part of the building was on an equal scale.

  Even in the flourishing times of the ranch, there had never been a need for a house half of this size, and, since the fortunes of the Loring family had fallen into a decline, it had been a great white elephant on the hands of the descendants of that first Loring who had made fame and fortune raising cattle. Twin Creeks had known him as its first rich citizen. Now it knew Pete Loring, his descendant two generations removed, as one of its most penniless vagabonds.

  For Pete was too filled with the greatness of his family in the past to be contented with any mere job as a rider on the range. He could ride and rope and shoot with the best of them, but the only accomplishment on which he prided himself and which he took pains to cultivate was his natural skill with a gun. For ability as a warrior was not out of key with the talents of a gentleman. Pete felt that the other accomplishments of a cowpuncher were rather to be frowned upon in himself. He had grown up in the last flush of the Loring prosperity, when they were still able to spend freely. He had as good an education as money was able to buy for him, and in a high-priced school he had picked up a taste for tailor-made cigarettes and wine. He had learned how to dress and how to talk as befitted a gentleman. His manners were smooth; his address could be ingratiating when he chose to make it so.

  But, as a rule, he did not choose, for he felt that his neighbors about Twin Creeks were frankly below him. Moreover, he knew that the
rough people in that vicinity were in the habit of smiling at his pride behind his back. They feared to affront him face to face because of his dreadful certainty with a gun. At the same time, among hard-working, careless-mannered cowpunchers and cowmen, he was considered in the light of a somber joke.

  All of this, because he was a sensitive man, he realized perfectly. It deepened the hatred and contempt with which he repaid their scorn. It gave a darker shadow to his character. He still felt that all of those prosperous ranches that had been split off, morsel by morsel, from the great mass of the one-time Loring estate, were owned by people who had pirated their wealth from his ancestors. He considered himself their victim. When he saw their fine horses and their careless expenditures, he begrudged them all of their dollars.

  Strange fancies grow up in an idle brain, and in the mind of young Peter Loring there was born a belief that, sooner or later, he was certain to have redress in some manner. The land that had once belonged to his forefathers, he felt should still be in the family, and he had a sort of sacred and inalienable right upon it. That this viewpoint might have been considered rather amusing by the men of the law never once occurred to him. In fact, he saw nothing amusing in himself. When he thought of himself, it was of a tragic figure, far above the pity of the world, but well worthy of its awe.

  These were the things that Charles Mervin had learned soon after the first of his long visits to Colonel Dinsmore. The only man in the neighborhood who was of breeding and refinement enough to be a companion to him, outside of the colonel himself, was young Loring. But these were the details that made a meeting with Loring impossible. He remembered all of this, while he surveyed the romantic, dark outlines of the big house that towered above him, and listened to the banging of a ruined shutter in the rising wind.

  Then a horse neighed loudly from the tangle of corrals that lay in the near distance, and the heart of Mervin grew stronger in him, for he was recalled to an identity of interest that he had with Loring, and the talking point on which he could open his call.

  FACING PETE LORING

  He dismounted at the hitching rack, tethered Flight, his mare, and advanced to the front door of the house, turning over in his mind the words with which he would introduce his subject. He was somewhat in trouble as he contemplated this thought. From what he had heard of young Peter Loring, that worthy might take it in mind to butcher his guest for daring to make the suggestions Mervin intended. Or else, he might decide to publish the proposals abroad and crush Mervin forever with the scorn of the world.

  Mervin flushed hotly, and then turned quite cold. He was still pale, but resolved, when he gave his summons at the front door, which was opened after a considerable time by an old servant, his back bowed and his head thrust forth by the withering touch of time. His toothless mouth, pursed together as he stared at the stranger, seemed struggling to suppress a grin of malicious glee. But when he heard the name of the visitor, he nodded and asked Mervin in.

  “Mister Loring,” he said, “is resting after his dinner, sir, but I will tell him you have come . . . if you will sit down.”

  He hobbled away, and Mervin looked about him with a particular interest. Poverty was what he wanted to see. Poverty, that strong alembic in which the good of human nature is so often distilled away and only the dregs of evil remain behind. There was all that he could have wished. The lofty hall, whose arched ceiling was vaulted over with shadows two stories above, contained for furniture a mirror with a wretched little table standing beside it and a single tottering chair. Along the walls, the heavy woodwork had warped with the moisture of winters and the dry heat of summers; it stood out in gaping seams; it waved along the wall. Along the unpainted floor a pale path was worn by the passage of many feet from the front door to the next room.

  Mervin noted these things and felt at the same time a chill of dread and of relief. The dread was inspired by the feeling that this man had been wronged by the world—that he must inevitably have been so, or else his condition could never have been like this. Those who have been wronged by society, repay society, in turn, with an unfailing, deathless passion for destruction.

  The older servant was gone for some time, and, during his absence, Mervin heard certain stealthy sounds in the distance, as of furniture being quietly moved. He smiled, and the traces of the smile had not yet left his eyes when the old man returned and ushered him into an adjoining room.

  It was bare as a tomb. The curtain rods were still rusting in their brackets, but the curtains were long since gone. A rag rug made a small patch on the wide, worn surface of the floor, and there were a few old chairs that had once been splendidly upholstered with leather. Rough usage had split away the leather here and there, and the contents were oozing forth—rolls of stiff padding.

  The central piece was a table over the top of which, apparently, a cloth had been thrown—and thrown very recently and hastily, to judge by the wrinkles in it. An exposed corner of the surface of the table was notched with old brown and black marks where cigarette stubs had burned out, and in an easy chair beside the table sat Peter Loring himself, reading. The shaded oil lamp marked a path of light across his breast and over the slender, bony hands that supported the book. The rest of the man was in the dark. It was not until he had put aside the book and advanced to meet Mervin that the latter could make out his features. Then he recalled having seen the man before—riding a brown horse with two white legs—the same horse, in fact, whose description had in the first place inspired his visit this night.

  Peter Loring was still known as Young Pete because in the background of the time behind him there loomed the grand form of Old Peter, gaunt, gray, taciturn, kindly. But he was well over thirty, and looked even older. He was a yellow-skinned, unhealthy-looking fellow with sunken black eyes and remarkably heavy black eyebrows that ran in a level, unbroken line across his forehead. On his coat were dim white spots—cigarette ashes that had recently been hastily brushed away, and the whole room was thick and rank with the heavy sweetness of the Egyptian tobacco.

  “I am Charles Mervin,” said the visitor.

  “I’m very glad to know you,” said Loring. “Will you take this chair?”

  “I won’t disturb you. . . .”

  “If you please,” said Loring, rather imperiously. “Because, as a matter of fact, the others cannot be offered to a guest.”

  He added this with a slight lifting of his chin and a flare of hostile light in his eyes, which Mervin avoided instinctively. But he took the chair that was pointed out to him with no further argument.

  “You are staying with Colonel Dinsmore?” asked the other.

  “The colonel has brought me out here a number of times. He knows that I love the open. And there’s no open country in the East, you know. All too intimate. Little rolling hills . . . towns everywhere . . . a handmade countryside. Very different from the West, you know.”

  To the majority of this speech, Loring replied with a gloomy nod, and all that he cared to say in answer was:“In the life of my father, sir, we saw a good deal of Colonel Dinsmore. I might even say that he was a family friend. But our fortunes have changed. Lately, the colonel, I may say, is a most infrequent visitor. A very rare pleasure to have a glimpse of him here.”These last words came out in a drawling voice with a covered snarl of danger behind.

  “The colonel,” Mervin said defensively, “is such a gay fellow and has so many friends that I suppose we all see not half as much of him as we’d like to.”

  “Perhaps . . . perhaps,” muttered Loring, with his habitual frown. “I haven’t offered you a cigarette?” He lighted the smoke ceremoniously for Mervin.

  “This is good stuff!” exclaimed the latter.

  The dry tinder of Loring’s temper instantly caught fire. “We have fallen very low, indeed,” he said, “but still we can afford a bit of the best tobacco, Mister Mervin.” He drew himself into a frozen silence, guarded with a mirthless smile.

  Mervin was appalled. He had been prepared fo
r a difficult interview, but this man was impossible of handling, it seemed. The high hopes that he had begun to build into the sky, he felt crumbling beneath his touch. He saw that he must strike into the nature of his business if he wished to make any headway whatever.

  “You are riding a horse in the Jericho race?” he suggested at last.

  “One must be amused,” answered Loring. “I was able to rake together enough cash for the entry fee. As well that as to pay grocery bills, eh?” Once more his sour smile dared Mervin to show the slightest hint of surprise or even of amusement.

  “You are a lover of horses, I see,” Mervin said, trying another tack.

  “Not at all,” replied Loring. “Not at all. In fact, I frankly confess that I despise the sentimental bosh that a good many men of apparent sense talk about horseflesh. A horse is a dumb beast. If it was designed by God for any useful purpose, it was designed to be a slave to men, and any thing that is a slave is worth nothing but contempt. I have a truer respect for a mule than for a horse, Mister Mervin. I assure you that I respect a mule more because, though we may compel it to serve us, it serves us with frank hatred all the days of its life.”

  This cool doctrine he enunciated slowly, and his deep black eyes searched the face of Mervin slowly, carefully, for the faintest trace of dissent. As for Mervin, he was half inclined to think that the man was under the influence of liquor. He had never seen before so much wicked devil in any human. Perversity was the one controlling passion in the life of Loring, it seemed.

  “A very sensible way of looking at it,” Mervin stated, determined to be pleased in appearance. “As you say, there is a great deal of bosh talked at one time or another about horses. I understand, by the way, that the horse you ride greatly resembles mine.”